CITIZEN SCIENCE

The medical breakthroughs helped by ordinary people

THIS week: Understanding how we learn language ANALYSING babies’ babbles may hold clues to how we learn language, and could help identify conditions such as autism earlier.

In the first months of life, babies start to babble — sounds closer to those of adult speech — which gradually grow more complex. To find out if all babies babble at similar rates regardless of language, or whether they have autism or other conditions, an international research team is asking members of the public to analyse short clips online. Volunteers listen to sound recordings of 73,000 children worldwide aged from three months to four years, and decide if they’re making speech sounds or noises such as laughter or crying. So far more than 5,000 people have joined The Maturity of Baby Sounds project, launched in March.